The painful experience of life under the ANC government
Article first published in City Press on 12 May 2024
It is difficult to imagine that there are people at this critical time, 30 years into South Africa’s democracy, who are not reflecting on what this transition means at a personal level.
This is how it should be. The essence of freedom from the violent apartheid subjugation of black people will always be evaluated at a personal level. Do the lived experiences of those who were racially excluded under the apartheid regime honestly reflect the transformation that they yearned for and for which they overwhelmingly voted the ANC into power?
This is the national question of the moment. Naturally, it will be impossible for any government to deliver on all our individual hopes and expectations without a substantial cooperation and push from our own agency as individuals.
As members of communities, we must temper our individual wishes to include the collective wishes of the majority.It is for this reason that we adopted the Constitution as an expression of our collective wish and expectations.
At this moment, it is important to remind ourselves of this collective wish and commitment as articulated in its preamble.
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The challenge for us, as we reflect on the past 30 years, may well be tested and foregrounded on the following significant statement in the preamble to our Constitution:
Improve the quality of life of all citizens and free the potential of each person.
Furthermore, the preamble urges us to establish a society based on “democratic values, social justice and fundamental human rights”.
A reflection on the past 30 years would be inadequate without an attempt to reflect on how well the ANC understood the mandate of the people to deliver on these expectations at the beginning of the democratic transition.
Conventional wisdom dictates that the ability of the ANC government to deliver on these expectations must optimally turn on the following conditions:
- A deep and comprehensive understanding of the key needs of the people;
- Responsive policies that are relevant, pragmatic; and
- A capable state system to deliver on critical social services that are equitable and consistent with available resources.
Over the past 30 years, the ANC government has produced a reasonably well-structured set of policies designed to respond to and address various competing demands from the people. It is self-evident that such a response must necessarily be executed and experienced at community and local levels.
A reflection on the ANC’s performance over these three decades must therefore centre on the level of the capability of the state’s operating structures. This should be at all levels created and properly undergirded to enable them to deliver on policy promises and obligations. The reflections must therefore pivot on the capability of the state system to deliver as the most compelling driver.
The state governance framework is currently structured around three tiers of government – the local, the provincial and the national spheres – and a separate and independent judiciary.
The perceptions of the people can be best understood if the reflections are focused on the local level. This is the coal face of government. And, for this reason, reliance must be placed on the various annual reports of the Auditor-General of SA, which have been issued over time and supported by various reports on state interventions from NGOs.
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All of them provide a horror situation on the operational state of local government and municipalities. Many municipalities in South Africa are characterised by failed and collapsing capabilities to deliver public services, resulting from poor financial management and a lack of the necessary skills and capacity.
According to this year’s Auditor-General report, the best three municipalities in South Africa were all in the Western Cape. The rest are in varying stages of dysfunctionality.
A depressing feature of the collapse of services in municipalities is best demonstrated in water and sewage treatment systems. It manifests in raw sewage flowing on the streets and into the rivers and catchment areas. In many cases, the systems are old and neglected.
The maintenance and upgrading of facilities were neglected on a wide scale. Worse, they are not managed by skilled people. This is the most significant and lasting memory of life under the ANC government because of the direct impact this has on the people’s health and their quality of life.
Reference to health invites a critical review of the state of public health services and infrastructure during this period. It is true that many clinics were built in rural areas across the country in the past three decades. But a problem in quality public health services is manifested in these areas.
Generally, the poor infrastructure is also not well maintained. Critical equipment and machinery for treatment and investigations are not available.
Other critical and well-known facilities such as Johannesburg’s Charlotte Maxeke Academic Hospital have been visibly neglected. The provision of vital medicines and the supply of chronic medicines has been neglected.
Then there is pervasive poor human resources planning and training of doctors and nursing staff. Many district and local hospitals are managed by inexperienced CEOs who were deployed on the basis of their loyalty to the governing party.
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The best way to understand the crises in health services is to visit any public hospital to monitor the slow progress in the long queues for consultations and collection of medicines.
These shortcomings in the public health sector mainly affect the poor. Those in the middle class always have a choice and they have totally abandoned the public health system.
It is difficult to understand how the ANC government, which was presumed to have a high level of consciousness for social justice, could neglect the poor in such a criminally reprehensible manner in the provision of health services.
In a 2019 critical review titled Challenges of quality improvement in the healthcare of South Africa postapartheid, Winnie Maphumulo and Busisiwe Bhengu concluded:
The findings revealed that there were many quality improvement programmes that had been initiated, adapted, modified and then tested, but did not produce the required level of quality service delivery.
“As a result, the government of South Africa has a challenge to ensure that implementation of national core standards will deliver the desired health outcomes,” the authors noted.
Whereas there may be a rational explanation of all the weaknesses in the public health system, in the mind of the ordinary citizens, this failure is seen as result of an uncaring government. The current high level of resentment of the ANC is driven by this perception from the people’s lived experiences since 1994.
The cumulative impact of collapsing and dysfunctional municipalities, which fail to provide public services, and the failed public health system, constitute the most damaging and painful experience of life in the democratic era under the ANC government.
These are justified perceptions of poor South Africans who feel neglected.